JCBreckenridge: "Which is why the South was owed either compensation for what they did pay or the installations in the South. Either/or."

I thought you were going to go out and find that wondrous law which amazingly says that just because you and your buddies get together and declare your "secession", suddenly, magically, by the power invested in WHO, all Federal property suddenly becomes yours.

BJK: "I thought you were going to go out and find that wondrous law which amazingly says that just because you and your buddies get together and declare your "secession", suddenly, magically, by the power invested in WHO, all Federal property suddenly becomes yours."

JCBreckenridge: "Its called the constitution. :)"

Well then, FRiend, don't hold back! Tell us the Article and Section where all that is spelled out.

x from post #581: "You don't get to declare yourself not a part of the country and seize federal property or take umbrage at the fact that federal property in other parts of the country hasn't yet been stolen by you. "

The only stealing that went on before May 6, 1861 was secessionist forces stealing dozens of Federal properties (forts, armories, arsenals, ships, mints, etc.) and threatening Union officials, all over the Confederacy.

But once the Confederacy formally declared war on the United States (May 6, 1861), then US forces began (May 23) to liberate Confederate human "contraband property" -- which (who) escaped into Union protection in ever increasing numbers.

rockrr: "Im not sure that BroJoeK gets your point but I do. It is rare that we can get a candid revelation from the lost causers just how deep and irrational their hatred of other Americans really runs."

You're right, I don't understand it. In all those years I lived in Germany, only once met a German with a nostalgia for the old reich, and even he didn't seem to hold a grudge against Americans.

But I do know how Southern Appalachian mountain people feel about their low-lander and flat-lander cousins -- they don't like the (cv's term) "haughty bastards". I doubt if many hillbillies want to shoot at flat-landers, but they sure don't want to be bullied by the Southern equivalent of (another poster's term) "Yankee self-righteousness."

So, while cv and others here get all riled up about some supposed New England cultural pretentiousness, they don't themselves do so much to "win friends and influence people" in their own back yards, it seems.

The Civil War had a lot to do with procedure. For the secessionists it wasn't just about becoming independent, but also very much about making oneself independent by one's own action and not being handed independence from anyone else.

They weren't going to follow a constitutional or congressional procedure that might eventually result in a dissolution of the union by common consent. In their own minds they had to perform the act themselves. As one of the few women posters here commented, it was a manhood or courage or testosterone thing.

Dissolution of the union by a breakaway state without federal consent was something no president could consent to, all the more so since the rebel leaders were trying to break off as many (slave-owning) states as they could, which would result in the capital itself being surrounded or annexed by a hostile power.

Lincoln (or any other president) could have presided over a dissolution of the union if it were achieved at the federal level through common consent, but couldn't accept a breakdown of the union by subversive or seditious forces acting in the states without federal input and consent. It would look like cowardice or appeasement in the face of anarchy or aggression, and there were important matters to be decided before any parting.

For one thing, there was the question of whether the procedures in the seceding states actually were valid and representative of the popular will. And there was the question of what to do with Southern unionists and areas that wished to remain inside the union.

It was also not out of place that the US might want to retain for national security purposes some military installations it had been given. You could think of that as part of the price of independence, a minor concession to achieve a larger goal. But if you still think it was just to seize all federal property in your territories as a cockeyed compensation for the common federal property you "lost" when you ran away, you probably won't.

One could make a comparison to the Irish Civil War. With 90 years hindsight we know that Ireland was all but independent when the war broke out. All they needed to do was consent to the King's portrait on money and stamps and a do-nothing Governor General (and of course, the partition) and wait until they could eventually make independence a formality.

Michael Collins accepted this. De Valera didn't. So there was war. Collins was killed. His side won. De Valera was eventually elected and, in time, declared independence. My parallel with our own civil war is that pride and emotionality may have gotten the better of wisdom and restraint (though plenty of Irish people would disagree).

Contrast both civil wars with civil disobedience movements like Gandhi's in South Africa and India, or Martin Luther King's in the US and similar movements in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. They accepted the authorities de facto. That is, whether or not they thought the government was legally legitimate or justly entitled to hold power over them, they accepted that it was in fact in power. Then they tried to make such a nuisance of themselves that the government would eventually throw up its hands and give them what they desired -- equality, desegregation, or independence.

We also have the developing law of enclaves and exclaves: Hong Kong, Macao, West Berlin, Guantanamo. A change in status in the surrounding territory didn't affect their status. This was largely because the countries occupying the enclaves had great military might, but still we do have the example now. And the example of Canada, which set conditions for a possible exit of Quebec.

Clearly the secessionist leaders didn't have these examples before them, and they were influenced by the American Revolution (wrong-headedly but influenced none the less), but I'd have to call them a very poor example of how to achieve political ends. They were more impatient, wrathful, domineering than they should have been.

Some people say that as slave owners the leaders of the movement couldn't whole-heartedly appeal to liberty. I don't know if that's true, but certainly there was too much of the master in their approach. Sometimes you have to give a little -- to make largely formal concessions, to bend the knee a bit -- in order to achieve large goals, and this they were not able to do. Their loss, I guess. But at least we shouldn't act like there wasn't a lesson to be learned in that.

The forts of the north were not their exclusive property to dispose of as they saw fit.

Too much tit for tat makes you a twit and a tw*t. Turning sensible points around to make nonsensical arguments makes you look foolish.

You can't claim to be in and out. You can't claim that you aren't part of the union and claim that forts and courthouses in other states are your "property" in the way that they would be if you were in the union.

In the unionists' view, though, those forts and courthouses were still your "property" and ours, because you were in fact still a part of the union. So even if guns were pointed at you, they were still your guns.

Your representatives in Congress have a say in what's done with them, so long as they get their *sses back to Washington, and your soldiers can use the guns so long as they serve in the national ranks. Happy now?

The country isn't a loose alliance of independent or sovereign states, but a federation in which sovereignty and authority are shared, so dissolving the union isn't something any part of it can do at will.

The attempt at unilateral secession was a mistake. We can see now that it was a mistake and how it was a mistake, and we can learn from the mistake.

You may not see it or want to see it or may wish that it was otherwise. Maybe that's understandable, but it's your own problem, not anybody else's.

Ok, what about unilateral don’t you understand? Are just trying to be stupid. Yes, all agree that South Carolina unilaterally seceded. Mississippi did not. By definition a Confederacy IS NOT UNILATERAL.

632
posted on 03/17/2013 4:00:13 PM PDT
by central_va
(I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)

1. relating to, occurring on, or involving one side only: unilateral development; a unilateral approach. 2. undertaken or done by or on behalf of one side, party, or faction only; not mutual: a unilateral decision; unilateral disarmament.

Synonyms one-sided

Now tell us where rebel secession was a mutual decision, agreed to by both sides of the issue and then you can accuse us of being off our game.

It was a unilateral decision in that the side of secession walked out, grabbed everything they could get their hands on, repudiated responsibility for obligation the country entered into while they were a part and the side that got shafted had no say in the matter, were not consulted, and did not have a chance for their side to be considered.

You can argue that the South was misguided, but you cannot argue they did not have the authority, as free men and free people, to do what they did attempt.

Sure I can.

The Declaration was in its essence a moral document. It was intended to define the conditions under which rebellion was morally justified and was quite specific about it.

Rebellion is morally justified when the existing government becomes destructive of the ends for which the Declaration says governments exist: To protect the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Rebellions engaged in for the purpose of depriving other humans of these rights are not and cannot be morally justified under the conditions specified by the Declaration.

If any and all rebellions or revolts are justified simply because some people choose to rebel, then the various Communist and other revolutions were justifiable under the principle of the Declaration of Independence. And they weren't, since their entire purpose was to deprive other humans of the rights the DOI champions.

Similarly, since the purpose of secession was not to expand the rights of men, but rather to prevent any such possible expansion, secession cannot be morally justified by the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

This is not to say that the Founders were stupid enough to not realize that any rebellion with enough physical force behind it could win. They knew that. Which is why the Declaration addressed the morality of revolution, not its practical power to make itself effective.

“Similarly, since the purpose of secession was not to expand the rights of men, but rather to prevent any such possible expansion, secession cannot be morally justified by the principles of the Declaration of Independence.”

Which of course, begs the question as to, “what was the purpose of secession?”

As we see today, the concept of an overarching federal government and history has shown a mostly untrammelled expansion of federal power.

Is this really the basis by which the Republic was founded? Or was there another principle? Governments are governed by the consent of the governed - if the people themselves vote not to be ruled by the state - then the state has lost the confidence of the people and must be released.

This happened in South Carolina and throughout the South. Peaceable votes held by the legislature to leave the United States are sufficient cause in and of itself to show that the present governmnet had lost the consent of the governed.

642
posted on 03/17/2013 5:30:41 PM PDT
by JCBreckenridge
(Texas is a state of mind - Steinbeck)

It is a God given right to rebel for any reason, or no reason at all as the case may be.

I would argue that the right to rebel (i.e. take up arms and shed blood) is only justified by God (or under 'Natural Law) if you are rebelling from abuse, and as Madison put it 'Intolerable Abuse.'

I have yet to hear any of the Confederacy's 'Lost Cause' school defenders define what abuses they were suffering in 1860 that morally justified their rebellion and resort to arms and bloodshed at that point in time. Not a thing had been done to them at that point.

It is a question I have asked here for years and have never once got an answer that justified the Confederate States rebellion against the United States.

It always comes back to the point I try to make. It was the expansion of slavery which was an economic imperative to the Southern states, while the majority of the population of the North with the election of Lincoln on a platform that finally promised to stop the expansion of slavery. That is entirely what drove events.

Of course, for a decade or more before the events in 1860, many in the South knew that day would eventually come when the nation rejected slavery and had campaigned for disunion long before anyone had ever heard of Lincoln and there was no such thing as a Republican party.

It was no harm or abuse done to any state or citizen by the Federal government or any other state that caused the Civil War.

It was simply this. With the ascendancy of Republicans in congress and Lincoln to the presidency, they correctly saw the threat to their social and economic institutions, if slavery had been confined forever to the 15 states that then had slavery.

If expansion of slavery was blocked, both the economic and social order of those slave states, especially those in the deep south was in dire jeopardy.

If in the north some combination of powers at the time said, 'You can keep all of your railroads and iron forges and textile mills and other factories where you have them now. But you will never be able to build another in any other state, the situation could likely have been reversed... who knows.

Reading your posts, I'm just not seeing any love for anything American since 1860!

You sound more like one of those Euro-jerks that hate anything American just because it's American or should I suggest one of those equally idiotic Skin Head jerks who hate this country just as much as you do and couldn't give one reason why other than the fact that they are total losers.

Yes, we have problems with our governments -- local, state and Federal. But hate such as you project?

No rational justification for that crap.

I think you are way too tied up in myths about your ancestors to be of any value in these debates.

There were 11 states in the Confederacy, therefore it was not unilateral.

So yes, South Carolina's secession was unilateral, after which it became a plurality of states.

Definition of PLURALITY
1 : the state of being plural
: the state of being numerous
: a large number or quantity
2: pluralism 1; also : a benefice held by pluralism
3 : a number greater than another
: an excess of votes over those cast for an opposing candidate

648
posted on 03/17/2013 6:36:28 PM PDT
by central_va
(I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)

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